rest
by Darth Krande
Summary: "Tarn, you need to promise one thing" the broken mech whispered. "You will never, never ask... what I have seen. Swear on Megatron's name... that you will never... never ask." Who is he, and what horror did he witness? And what happened to his face? Spoilers for MTMTE 7.


'**rest**

Sequel to Accord. Not to be taken seriously!

Another accomplished mission. Another Decepticon blemish elliminated. They should call it a good orn.

The radiant, unexpected explosion threw Tarn several metrics backwards. As his audio systems rebooted, he heard fluent cursing in ancient Cybertronian. It looked like he wasn't the only one caught in mid-transformation. But apart from a few cracks, the whole Division seemed to be uninjured. Then he noticed the lifeless body in the middle of the crater.

Recognition hit him in the spark.

He hurried to the scene, his processors desperately running through his music files. Decepticon Justice Division members tended to be changing from time to time, but he was not yet ready to sing the death song for the mech now lying in the ruins.

His colors were unrecognizable, most likely he had different shades of grey before it all got burnt off him in the fire. Wounds that should have been bleeding, if the mech hadn't bled out before. T-cog still warm. Brain modules, despite the serious injury to (or more exactly: the lack of) his face, were intact. His spark of life quickly fading away.

"Kaon!" he cried out. "Come down here!"

He could do it, he told himself. By the laws of Cybertronian technology, the mech could still be saved if he could restore his spark's functioning. Now, that was something he'd never attempted before.

He scrolled through his playlist, seeking the matching tones. Once there was a time when he would have played that piece for the opposite purpose, had he not been muted at the time. Many things had changed since then.

The soft hum filled the crater, and, as he increased the volume, he picked up a flicker that could have been the sign of a returning spark activity. But where in the Pit was Kaon?!

He looked at the wreck that once used to be a proud, stubborn Division member. He looked worse than most of their targets after an outstandingly creative session. He had at least a thousand fragments that shouldn't have been moving on their own. The torn-off face. No energon running through him at all.

"Prepare a jolt" he ordered the arriving Kaon. "Up to maximum, and charge at the end of the second line of the choir. We'll need careful timing to jump-start his spark."

The music intensified, and the spark of the broken mech reacted accordingly. It was an artificial spark pulse, but a spark pulse still. At the end of the choir's second line, the brightest lightning struck from the obviously confused and puzzled Kaon, electrifying the wreck. The mech looked like he was already done with.

The charge ran through him, from helm to claws. His hand transformed, albeit unconsciously, back to a regular hand of an upper-caste mechanism. His systems (how could they still function?) attempted a reboot. The music intensified.

He would need to be on spark support for a while, but he would live, Kaon noticed. If that was what Tarn intended. But why? Couldn't they just extract the data from the hardware, and move on to the next target?

To their surprise, the mech had successfully booted for the second attempt. He didn't seem to be very much online, for when he'd looked at the Decepticon-masked face, he didn't show any signs of fear. That was something unexpected from a victim.

"Tarn...?"

How did he know the team leader?

"Tarn, you need to promise one thing" the broken mech whispered. "You will never, never ask... what I have seen. Swear on Megatron's name... that you will never... never ask."

With that, the mech passed out again.

He was pulled out from the crater of the explosion he had arrived with, and taken on board the Peaceful Tyranny. After a joor of careful energizing, he started to look like a living mechanism again.

Tarn was there by his berth, playing a sonata, then changing to a triumphant march. The mech's sparkbeat seemed to be stabilized, but as he started to reboot from the involuntary shut-down, horrifying images crossed his processor again and again. Judging from his reactions, what he had seen were worse than the whole Division together. Not that, as Kaon started to suspect, he had anything to fear from the group.

For the law enforcer, it promised to be a regular, mundane work at start. He was tracking down an organic species that's technology awfully resembled reverse-engineered Cybertronian techs, and he had found... he had found... something that his fellow Division members should never see. The sight would have shocked, if not outright killed Megatron's zealous fanatics. They were so sensitive about his reputation, they had better never found out what he had learned on that Primus-forsaken organic planet. He had called for the local Decepticons' help, but even that one signal had cost him his whole face.

"So what?" Tesarus asked, looking down at the done-with mech, and Tarn, who was currently playing Instruments of Destruction. "Is he something like our one-mech Autobot partner organization?"

"The name is Tyrest" Helex said from the background. From this point, everyone with just a little knowledge of Cybertronian history was supposed to know where the mech belonged.

"Chief Justice Tyrest" the broken mech specified. He coughed up a pint of liquid energon as he spoke, but, Pit, even that was a progress, from the condition he was found in.

"So, where have you been?" Tarn asked.

Tyrest's face expression would have turned darker, if he had a face for that. Images of unworthy humans with funny underpants crossed his processors again. Not to mention how they treated Him. He was not going to say a word about that.

"Where have you been, Tyrest?" Tarn insisted.

"Bayverse."


End file.
